![]() Scrivener combines all the writing tools you need to craft your first draft, from nascent notion to final full stop. For instance, if a character is confronting a rare illness, your 16-page research article from a medical journal is much more useful when you cannot only highlight the relevant sentences but literally pull them out for easy reference or even copying into other apps.“The biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.” -Michael Marshall Smith, bestselling author Helpfully, each dropped bit of text remains linked to its place in the original document so you can always go back and see it in context.īecause LiquidText excels at this kind of document handling, it's particularly useful if you're gathering lots of information about, say, an unfamiliar location or occupation or anything else in your novel. But use your iPad in landscape mode, and your documents shift to the left, opening up a workspace on the right side of the screen where you can actually drag and drop selected text for easy reference. First, you can highlight important text-from both PDFs and Web sites, using the app's integrated browser. For me, though, it is the app where I store all of my PDF and Web-based research. If Drafts is "a note-taking app," LiquidText is a PDF reader. For the long-term storage of notes and ideas-or if I know the text never has to go anywhere else-I prefer Notes. It isn't ideal as a warehouse for text, though you can use it for that if you like. Drafts gives you just about every option available for text actions: Send it as an email or Twitter post, add it to your calendar, post it to your blog, save it to Dropbox, copy/print/share it, etc.įor me, Drafts is mainly for easily getting text in and out again. You don't even have to know what you want to do with what you've written that's decided after you're done. As soon as the app opens, you can start typing. There are no folders to open, no file names to come up with, no hassle whatsoever. Want to quickly jot a note, remind yourself of a useful resource to check out, email a writer friend for advice? Tap the Drafts icon and start typing. What sets it apart from other note-taking apps, such as Apple's own Notes, is that it requires zero effort. But if you're in need of a way to very quickly capture ideas, Drafts may be just what you're looking for. Even if these devices never push aside your main computer, they can be invaluable adjuncts.ĭrafts is a note-taking app. You can dictate ideas in the car, jot a couple of paragraphs at the doctor's office, and write a sentence or two while on-line at the Post Office. Which means novel writing doesn't have to wait until you have a few free hours at your desk. But if you own an iPad or iPhone, either one or both are probably always close to hand. ![]() For the last two years, I've been working entirely on an iPad, an enthusiastic convert to an iOS-only workflow. ![]() Reaching your NaNoWriMo goals will be a lot easier with the help of an iPhone and/or iPad. (See my other post here about NaNoWriMo.) Otherwise, you may spend more time on research and character building than writing. But if you're thinking about joining the thousands of others who will set aside time this fall to write the story you've been yearning to write, it pays to lay the groundwork before November 1 comes along. Which means the month that celebrates novel writing-November-is still a couple of months away.
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